abixb

I wonder when we crossed the "99 percentile of intelligence for 99% of the usecases" threshold. At this point, the gains seem to be right at the very edge of bleeding edge for narrow and specialized use cases, and wonder if it'll be a sort of diminishing return from here on.

If what you're saying is true and accurate, then US-based AI labs are in big trouble. The only saving grace might be some sort of a 'national security' proclamation banning the use of state-of-the-art Chinese (and non-US) models across US federal and state governments and large enterprises (especially ones with federal government contracts), but even still, US AI labs will probably lose out massively on international market if a smaller model can match SOTA of just a few months ago.

There's no way large companies outside the US will pay the "US AI lab" premium if they can get the same workloads done at a fraction of the cost using open-weight models that they can self-host and optimize/fine-tune on.

I've run this thought experiment a number of times with different sections of my (relatively) diverse friend circle. I ask them a version of this question on repeat: "what if AI automates X aspect of your work?", and the final answer (either because of frustration with the loopy nature of the question or a genuine stopping point) arrives somewhere along the lines of "my judgement," "my knack," "my embodied nature," or "my quality of decision making."

I think the core still leads back to human agency and the ability to consider aspects that wouldn't fit into an LLMs limited context window or be able to be vectorized into a DB, including ultra-long-term consequences (especially those with great thinking abilities).

I still happen to think that AI/LLMs will never be able to "fully" replace humans, because the evolutionary process that led to our cognitive abilities and the way we train LLMs are vastly different thanks to different pressures, but maybe that's just me defending the last bastions of our collective humanity as a human; I don't know what else to root for.

The amplifying mirror analogy works best here. LLMs are ultimately a reflection of your own interactions with its weights, the tone you use, the structure with which you construct your prompt, aspects of an issue you tend to focus on, your breadth of vocabulary and world knowledge and whatnot.

People who (carefully) use it as an extension of their own mind and senses will very likely thrive, and those who use it as a replacement for their minds and their senses will struggle.

One of the Claude skills I made Claude itself generate was the 'learning a concept across tiers' skill -- from ELI5 level to a PhD level, and it triggers whenever I ask it a very general question on a complex topic that isn't my bread-and-butter. The fact that I'm able to choose explanation level from a super smart LLM (that's available 24x7) that can explain any topic under the sun would've been mind-bogglingly sci-fi-ish just 4 years ago in 2022.

Good reminder.

As a percentage, most of my 'reading' has been outputs of frontier AI models. Need to increase my ratio of consuming human-written and human-produced text. Sometimes I fear drifting away from the 'core reality' of everyday life here in the US Midwest given how much I use AI.

Thank you for the recommendation. I'm yet to checkout any of Neal Stephenson's works, which is real unfortunate.

Well, the goal was to make them come up with cutting-edge theories and/or hypothesis to the most pressing problems facing humanity. Kids will naturally specialize (just like... MoE models?) as their find their groove while growing up, but the goal is to make sure highly gifted kids from diverse background get highest quality space to think without being moulded or "adulterated" by the noise of pop culture and "everyday" life.

Yes. I continue to believe that humans will still be the source of the vast majority of novel ideas, even as they increasingly use AI-related tools to accelerate their works.

One of the though experiments I ran with one of my friends during a recent conversation over drinks was this: raising a bunch of "control group" kids away from the screens and the algorithmic ocean of "normie-tier content," and in a very learner-friendly setting with hyper-strict control on the quality of media and source material they get access to, just like we've been doing it with frontier models. Think of it like a monastery but for kids, while teaching them all the latest advances in our understanding of reality through mathematics, engineering, computer science, deep learning, and whatnot.

What I'm getting at it is that we might still need super smart people to push the boundaries of knowledge while using super-advanced AI tools, and anyone who says AI will "completely replace" humans are just misguided. We will always need super smart people with largely unadulterated thinking.

So the rumors were right, Opus 5 was indeed being polished up for release. Huge improvements in GDPval-AA v2 too -- great for some of the knowledge work-based agentic workloads I run.

Also glad they still kepy Fable 5 on "credits only" access. I think we're going to start seeing model providers gate top-of-the-line models behind pay-as-you-go API rates/credits while subsidizing other models on monthly subscriptions.

/r/whooosh

Fantastic, did you go for a particular "trusted" brand or just went on vibes? How should one rationally approach shopping for a CO2 monitor for home office use?

Tangential, but I got introduced to Red Alert C&C through various 'Hell March' videos by random fans of various militaries on YouTube. It's funny how it vibes with nearly every military you throw it over.

I like the fact that OpenAI went with a three-part celestial naming convention to one-up Anthropic's literary naming concention. Maybe we'll get Stellar and Galactic someday.

The Australian Military Aviation History channel on YouTube has a series of two fantastic videos on South Korea's KF-21 "Borame" program, and it also touches quite a bit on South Korean defense industrial base as a whole. [0][1]

As a military aviation enthusiast , I couldn't be happier that there seems to be a lot more diversity in military hardware developments, especially in close to state-of-the-art fighter jets, such as China's J-20/J-35, Turkey's KAAN, the GCAP/FCAS program, etc, with Dassault working on critical upgrades to current Rafales as well.

Global South countries have a lot more options for close to cutting edge military hardware than they had even a decade or two ago to close the gap with the West.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wFL0eRJVGQ

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6X5zuthz-s

Curious about others' contributions, such as Vaswani, Parmar, Jones and Gomez, to the paper. What sucks about co-authorship in research papers is that you don't get a clean breakdown of who contributed what to the research paper, and the distribution (in more cases than not) is very much like a pareto distribution.

I'm talking from plenty of group project experience here.

Great response.

Good thing about LLMs is that they can't put the genie back in the bottle, and long after OpenAI and Anthropic bite the dust (not wishing that but just saying given their trajectories), there will continue to be people, engineers and startups working on open source LLMs.

My hope is that we're able to somehow repurpose all of the GPU chiplets currently sitting in warehouses and in massive datacenters for broader consumer, academic, educational and non-profit consumption. It will create such great value and ripple effect creating and spreading hardware + computing literacy far and wide. Ugh, hope that happens.

Ugh.

Well said though. Anthropic's actions aren't inspiring confidence in me as a subscriber. Looks like we're moving towards a world where companies can simply change the terms of the subscription after the fact, consumer rights be damned.

I'm just a small fish (subscribe to the Max 5x plan), but I'm sure I'm not alone in my inclination to consider canceling my subscription with Claude and stop giving $$$ to Anthropic.

>We estimate they will impact ~0.03% of traffic, concentrated in fewer than 0.1% of organizations

At the scale of API requests that Anthropic sees, I think the affected organization count might be substantial, and they might not be getting the full model capability that they're paying top $$$ for.

Also, wonder how they arrived at that estimation.

Maybe Oracle can acquire it back and put a few more giant hard-drive-inspired buildings there (it was orignally Sun Microsystems' campus).

Looks like a fantastic book at the outset. Thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks, good one. The current Russian economy is a shell of its former self. Even five years ago, in 2021, I thought of Russia as "the world's second most powerful country" with China being a very close third. Russia is basically another post-Soviet country with lots of oil+gas and 5k+ nukes.

Heavy Gemini user here, another observation: Gemini cites lots of "AI generated" videos as its primary source, which creates a closed loop and has the potential to debase shared reality.

A few days ago, I asked it some questions on Russia's industrial base and military hardware manufacturing capability, and it wrote a very convincing response, except the video embedded at the end of the response was an AI generated one. It might have had actual facts, but overall, my trust in Gemini's response to my query went DOWN after I noticed the AI generated video attached as the source.

Countering debasement of shared reality and NOT using AI generated videos as sources should be a HUGE priority for Google.

YouTube channels with AI generated videos have exploded in sheer quantity, and I think majority of the new channels and videos uploaded to YouTube might actually be AI; "Dead internet theory," et al.

Wonder if you could turn this into a .zim file for offline browsing with an offline browser like Kiwix, etc. [0]

I've been taking frequent "offline-only-day" breaks to consolidate whatever I've been learning, and Kiwix has been a great tool for reference (offline Wikipedia, StackOverflow and whatnot).

[0] https://kiwix.org/en/the-new-kiwix-library-is-available/

One could argue that the quality of life per horse went up, even if the total number of horses went down. Lots more horses now get raised in farms and are trained to participate in events like dressage and other equestrian sports.

>" One interpretation is that the extra $10 billion from the price increases will offset some of the red ink Microsoft is bleeding because of the investments they’re making in datacenter capacity, hardware, and software needed to make Copilot useful"

Saying the quiet part out loud. Looks like O365 folks will have to subsidize MSFT's losses in giving Azure compute away for its LLM customers. Not great.

I get that, but what I'm saying is that it's anticompetitive as heck. In a fair system, profits from NVDA's revenue growth should've been distributed to shareholders as dividends or reinvested into the company itself, not buy its own customers -- that's my (and countless others') biggest gripe with the whole AI bubble bs.

Antitrust regulators must be sleeping at the wheels.

Anthropomorphizing non-human things is only human.

The first step in building a large language model. That's when the model is initiated and trained on a huge dataset to learn patterns and whatnot. The "P" in "GPT" stands for "pre-trained."

>They’re absolutely going to get bailed out and socialize the losses somehow.

I've had that uneasy feeling for a while now. Just look at Jensen and Nvidia -- they're trying to get their hooks into every major critical sector as they're able to (Nokia last month, Synopsys just recently). When chickens come home to roost, my guess is that they'll pull out the "we're too big to fail, so bailout pls" card.

Crazy times. If only we had regulators with more spine.

Switching a Japanese dumbphone (Kyocera) was the best thing I ever did. Eliminating your smartphone (as inconvenient and life altering as it may be -- you'll need to figure out a path) is probably the single most effective thing you can do to get into the top 1-10%... of people with properly functioning cognition.